Space Station Goes a Little Greener

We all have a responsibility to the environment and Self Storage has always been a green industry, encouraging people to “save and reuse” instead of “dispose and renew” but at Space Station we have taken that one step further. We have set ourselves an objective to reduce our carbon footprint by no less than 50% over the next three years and achieve a Carbon Footprint Standard. Here’s how we are planning to do it.

Firstly we have to measure our current carbon footprint and so we have engaged a specialist independent company to do this for us.

Our biggest carbon usage by far is from electricity and so we are focusing our efforts firstly in this area.

Wind Power

Wind turbines are springing up all over the place and whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em you can’t deny that they help produce greener energy and so we have just installed a 5.5kw turbine on our roof at our Brentford Storage Centre. The next time you are on the Cheswick flyover and passing our building take a quick look and see for yourself.

Solar Panels

We will be installing 50kw solar panels onto all five of our Storage Facilities in Slough, Brentford x 2, Uxbridge and Isleworth generating up to 250kw of electricity per year.

We now have solar panels installed at three of our Storage Centre’s and they are producing 108,000kWh of 100% GREEN electricity. The annual Co2 saving from the three locations will be over 60 tonnes per annum

The installation was carried out by Infinite Energy who did an excellent, professional job from start to finish. You can find out more about them here. http://www.infiniteenergy.co.uk/commercial-solar-pv.asp

Lighting

We have over 3000 florescent lights in our Storage Centre’s and many of these are old and inefficient. We will be commencing a programme to change these lights over the next three years to T5 lighting which is very energy efficient without any compromise in lighting levels

Boxes

Another area we believe we can reduce our carbon footprint is our box sales. We provide all the packaging material anyone could ever need and we sell lots of storage boxes, thousands each year in fact. These boxes can be manufactured using only recycled card and so we are currently sourcing suppliers that can meet this criteria

Quote from our General Manager,

“Space Station Self Storage has led the way in the storage industry for many years. We opened what we believe to be the very first dedicated Self Storage Centre in the Country way back in 1983 in Brentford. Then we helped design an industry-specific software package for self storage and we are founding members of the Self Storage Association. I hope that our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint will create interest within the rest of the Self Storage industry and that Space Station can lead the way to an even more environmentally friendly industry.”